Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Washington Ferry in Rough Water

If you've been a reader here for a while, you are familiar with the fact that KeeWee and I live on a very large island, Whidbey Island. There are three main ways to get on and off of Whidbey, the Deception Pass pridge on the North end, the Keystone Washington State ferry West to Port Townsend, or the Clinton Washington State Ferry on the South end that takes you East towards Everett and Seattle, docking in Mukilteo.

It's not a long ferry ride from Clinton to Mukilteo, perhaps 20 minutes. About ten days ago there was a fairly good wind storm, but nothing spectacular. What WAS spectacular, however, was just how rough Puget Sound was where the ferry crosses to Mukilteo. When you get the tide running one way and the wind going the other way, it can get incredibly rough.

As the ferry Cathlamet was nearing Mukilteo a local photographer took some spectacular photos. These Issaquah 130 Class ferries are over 300 feet long and 78 feet wide and weigh in at 2477 tons (4,954,000 lbs) unloaded.

The Cathlamet is a fairly new boat, it's the ferry that had so many computer malfunctions when it first went into service and it knocked down a number of ferry docks. There was even a song on the local radio stations "Why is it Cathlamet, when you see a dock you ram it?"

Recent article said that WSF added more boats to the run so that the ferry wouldn't have to ride so low in the water, and they ran all boats after this one only half full.

Main problem here is that if sufficient water comes into the car deck, it can float the cars, causing them to all crash into each other. I hope everyone aboard had the good sense to run their cars through one of the many car washes along the boulevards after they got to Seattle...that salt water gets in everywhere in a storm like that.